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I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

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Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#221

Post by schwartzworld »

dang wrote: post #176
micv wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of being heavily opposed to homophobic organisation is degenerate in your opinion?

Please don't start this again. HN is a site for curiosity, not repetition ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... ) and particularly not flamewars ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ), which are the most destructive form of repetition. The GP should not have posted flamebait, and the repliers should not have taken the bait.

lol, you brought it up.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#222

Post by potatoz2 »

Macha wrote: post #114
avolcano wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft gates plenty of training content behind Visual Studio subscriptions. Also, who is the "provider" of the web platform?

WHATWG? The group of browser vendors that agree on web standards. I think the onus is on the person proposing a web technology to document it.

The spec already documents what ought to happen, what you need is documentation about what actually happens (say, on IE11).

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#223

Post by potatoz2 »

zelly wrote: post #212

ArchWiki[1] is a counterexample to the notion that the community cannot write good technical documentation. It is actually much better written and more thorough than MDN, but it's also concerning a topic that attracts many hobbyists. To be fair, web dev is not something many people do without being paid, as opposed to tinkering with Linux, so the talent pool may be smaller. Also, the W3C and ECMA standards documents…

ArchWiki is a good counterexample (so is Wikipedia I guess), but the W3C and ECMA specs are not: they document what ought to happen and are geared towards implementation, not what actually happens in practice or how to build a mental model about what happens.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#224

Post by hvis »

JaggedJax wrote: post #61
gambler wrote: post #6

>Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. >Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its s…

It looks like MDN has its own donation option separate from the Mozilla Foundation. They are pretty clear that the donations go towards MDN specifically. I suppose if this had been more well known about and supported the team may have survived, but supporting them directly could help grow that again. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ edit: Looking into this further, I cannot figure out how to actually don…

"You will be MDN member number 45"

I wonder if the number is such because they killed off the active subscription, or the program was only this "successful" to begin with.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#225

Post by nojvek »

I would pay for MDN. Their docs are really well done. I've used css-type package, which is autogenerated from the mdn json docs. It makes the development wonderful, no AI can match that. How do I put my money into the MDN fund, so it doesn't go to that a-hole CEO who gets million dollars of salary?

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#226

Post by nojvek »

paulirish wrote: post #202
jameslk wrote: post #17

Google seems to be paying technical writers to build the free (growing) alternative to MDN, https://web.dev . It's not a generalized web resource yet like MDN, but just wait. Of course, you'll have to accept that the documentation here will likely have a Chrome-centric view of web development, further establishing the Chrome-only version of the web. The loss of MDN will just result in Firefox becoming less relevant.…

(I'm a googler who works closely with the web.dev team). Google also pays technical writers to contribute to MDN which we consider to be THE destination for reference documentation. Both Google and Microsoft have employed multiple fulltime techwriters to contribute to MDN for the last ~7 years, I believe. We don't consider web.dev to be an alternative to MDN. web.dev doesn't do reference documentation, but rather gui…

Wow! paulirish on HN. I assume you have the best of intentions, I'm a massive fan of your work on DevTools and web.dev.

It's just hard to digest that this will always be the view of Google especially with its ads, search, android and chrome market share (monopoly). Google has conflicting interests and it's hard to digest "Chrome knows the fundamental importance of a diverse browser ecosystem".

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#227

Post by bccdee »

outime wrote: post #145
bccdee wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want political stances of any kind from an organization that's getting my money to make a specific thing better. Your notion of what "better" means is in and of itself a political stance.

No, not really. If I want to donate to achieve a specific technical goal (e.g. documentation about something completely apolitical) and nothing else that's not a political stance.

The choice to prioritize a charity which writes documentation over charities which address political issues is itself political.

I'll admit that's a bit slippery of me. A charity that writes technical documentation is about as apolitical as it gets. But my point is that every decision we make about how we should allocate resources in our society is political, because that's what politics is about. Expecting charities not to have political stances is silly, because the fundamental proposal every charity makes -- "let's all get together and spend money on X" -- is in and of itself political.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#228

Post by BrendanEich »

monksy wrote: post #154
dang wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> degenerate That breaks the site guidelines against flamebait calling names in arguments. Casual bomb-throwing leads to flamewars, and you started numerous flames with just that one word. We're trying to avoid that here, so please don't. You don't need that to make your point, so please stick to the rules. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I completely agree where you're coming from however, in the case of Mozilla I believe that the reference is relevant. If you see that the company is producing a good product that you're donating to support. Would the "customers" (supporters) want to support the time and cost associated with kicking out the CEO over personal+(believed to be) private activities? (Context: Brandon Eich donated 1k of his personal money t…

No one ever claimed hostile work environment. Where'd you get that?

The L.A. Times published the CA state database of political donations >= $100 in size, activists searched it for known names. That was in 2012.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#229

Post by thomasz »

crocodiletears wrote: post #190
hansjorg wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You routinely seem to allow (as in it not even warranting a comment) straight up dehumanizing language from many participants in here. I realize this kind of behaviour has been normalized by the president over the last four years, but I thought HN was better than this.

Degenerate's in increasingly common use. I can't speak to the parent's use of the term, indeed from the context of their statement, there's good reasons to be suspicious of their intent. However, my social circle uses it quite heavily to refer to things like people who consider pet ownership equivalent to parenting, neonazis, and karens who fabricate sleights against themselves in order to haggle prices at retail out…

When you consider the context of Mozilla’s lgbt politics it becomes crystal clear that this isn’t just harmless internet slang.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#230

Post by manquer »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #209
manquer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is not saying he wants decide how Firefox and MDN are run per se, He is saying we want to not be funding projects like pocket. We don't want or know how to run MDN or firefox, but we are grateful users who would like those to succeed and willing to contribute those projects specifically. The concern of about management salary is very important in Mozilla important than in a for profit entity. Shareholders / board…

>The deal with Google just got renewed well before the lay-off's, despite the empty words about global pandemic being a reason, there is no major impact on their revenue ( or Google's for that matter). I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure that "our revenues stayed the same between 2018-2023” would be seen as a failure in most companies. Not only do costs rise every year, employment decisions are made assuming it wi…

Mozilla is not any company.

For almost any non-profit maintaining their new donations for the same level for 5 years would be considered good performance.

Even in most aggressive startups maintaining revenues at $400-500 Million level is likely to cause first management change and rarely lay-offs of 25% of the workforce.

Even if that was the reason, clearly mangement have been unable and unlikely to that kind of growth. Firing quarter of your highly skilled workforce is not the right approach.

Had they killed 25% of the projects and retained the best of talent from those projects and repositioned them in other projects it would have made sense. While as you say such highly skilled workforce has salary growth expectations, hiring from the market is always costlier in terms of absolute salary, training, on-boarding, performance risk and finally attrition before RoI is achieved .

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